The Fortune of Survival – Intermarried German Jews in the Dying Breath of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’

In 1944, most of the remaining German Jews lived in mixed marriages. Those intermarried to a non-Jewish spouse were still exempt from deportation. In order to expel the last remaining Jews from their spheres of influence, Nazi authorities used the pretext of domestic security to evict them in September 1944 from the endangered western boarder of the German Reich to labour camps of the Organization Todt (OT). At the beginning of 1945, the Reich Security Main Office finally ordered the deportation of all remaining Jews in order to make the Reich 'free of Jews'. By analyzing the widespread regional literature and focusing on new archival findings, this article for the first time sheds light on the background of the persecution of the German Jews in the last stage of the Shoah and offers detailed statistical data. A close look on regional differences outlines the asynchronicity of its process and explains why most of the intermarried Jews escaped deportation to the very end and therefore had the fortune to survive.